Encrypting Backups

[Michael Ernstoff]

Has anyone any experience (and advice to offer) of encrypting tape backups?
Did you use hardware or software encryption?
Affect on backup times?

Thanks

[Tony Constantine_1]

Michael

Take a look at this link

http://my1.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x6b5768c57f64d4118fee0090279cd0f9,00.html

[Stefan Farrelly]

The only possibility I know of is using the command crypt before your backup is written to tape. eg. use tar, crypt the tar file with a key then write it to tape. Not ideal, but I think it should work and I dont know of any other method of encrypting backups from HP-UX (except possibly downloading pgp for HP-UX and using it instead of crypt).

[Darrel Louis]

The experience I have with Omniback.
Always use Hardware compression or encryption, because software uses a lot of CPU time.

Hardware encryption is faster.

[Michael Ernstoff]

Does Omniback have an encryption option then?

[Darrel Louis]

In the latest (3.10 and 3.50) of OBII its called data encoding.

Administrator Guide:
Page 186
Encode
Open Systems and public networking make data security in large
enterprises essential. OmniBack II lets you encode file and rawdisk data so that it becomes unreadable. Data is encoded before it is transferred over the network and before it is written to media. OmniBack II uses a fixed, built-in algorithm for this purpose.
By default, the encode option is set to OFF.

OB2ENCODE: Allows a user to always turn on data encoding regardless how the backup options are set in the backup specification.

The OB II A.03.10 Release Notes state the following information:

While the built-in data encoding and software data compression is still supported by OB II A.03.10, the customization interface is no longer supported. Backups generated using
customer supplied shared libraries for encoding or software data compression, cannot be restored after the client system
is upgraded to A.03.10.

The OB II A.03.50 Release Notes also contain the above information.
The customization option was removed at A.03.10, and at the same time the option was changed from Encrypt to Encode.